There will be stuff running in the background that will not show up in the programme list - it builds up over time - some benign and some not benign - lots of it spyng on what you do. It gets loaded and run at start time - starting up gradually takes longer and longer - you don't notice to begin with.
Get hold of a free spyware removal programme and run it - it will probably find hundreds of "threats" and remove them for you - run it weekly or monthly - I use Spybot Search & Destroy but there are others.
Find out how to access the start-up list on your machine and uncheck everything except perhaps for security software. There are about 20 entries in my start up list but only 3 are selected to run on start up.
Get Piriform's Ccleaner (the first C stands for crap) and use it to tidy and clean the machine's registry once a year - also defragment your disk(s) annually.
Use either the Task Manager or the free utility Process Explorer to see what's running at any time and how the machine and the network is performing. Do this First - you may have a rogue process eating nearly all the resources (99%) - if so go to a previous restore point before messing around with anything else
People often say "add more memory" to solve slow running issues - they are usually wrong - the machine probably ran plenty fast enough when it was new.
Good luck...
Peccavi, July 2010
